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Ross Douthat: Hillary Clinton: For the Democrats, there's no other alternative

By Ross Douthat

Posted:
06/10/2014 12:01:00 AM CDT

Updated:
06/10/2014 04:57:11 PM CDT

If the excerpts currently circulating in the press are any indication, Hillary Clinton's latest memoir will resemble pretty much every recent political memoir from a potential presidential candidate: That is, it will be chloroform in print.

Which no doubt troubles its "author" not at all. Clinton has every incentive to bore us, sedate us, lull us to sleep -- to hit the snooze button, in effect, for as long as our politics makes possible. She is the rare presidential hopeful who has nothing whatsoever to gain from making news. Leading the Democratic presidential field by a Secretariat-esque margin; leading every potential Republican candidate by around 10 points; running far ahead of President Barack Obama's job approval numbers ... if she had her way, all the months from here till 2016 would be consumed by devouring time without anything altering her current image.

And her desire converges almost perfectly with the interests of her party, even if not every liberal quite realizes it yet. That's because Clinton's iconic status is, increasingly, the only clear advantage the Democratic Party has. If her position is weakened, diminished or challenged, the entire coalition risks collapse.

Liberals don't see this clearly yet because they tend to regard the Obama coalition as a left-of-center mirror-image of Nixon's and Reagan's conservative majority -- a natural, settled and, thanks to demographic trends, growing presidential majority (if not a congressional one) that should deliver the White House to their party reliably for cycles to come.

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Because of this confidence, many Democratic partisans assume that 2016 will inevitably be better for their party than the looming midterms, and many analysts assume that the Republican Party is a long, long way from mounting a substantive challenge to liberalism. My friends on the left have an extensive list of things that the right simply "must" do before the GOP can be relevant at the presidential level again (crush the Tea Party, then move left on immigration, then move left on everything else .), and they express a certain condescension toward the recent stirrings of conservative policy innovation: Nice effort, but you'll have to move a lot further in our direction if you expect to win the White House back.

But there's a big flaw in their historical analogy. Political skill builds majorities, but popular policy successes cement them -- and that is what has consistently eluded Obama. He resembles Reagan when it comes to electoral-majority building, but he's a Reagan without the economic boom, without the foreign policy achievements and without the high approval ratings.

As Ramesh Ponnuru writes in the latest issue of National Review, while "the Democrats of the 1980s had to respond to a country that was largely happy with Republican governance and to specific conservative policy successes," today's electorate "is persistently unhappy" with the direction of the country, and "liberal policy successes are too hard to detect to be the basis for concessions" by the right. And liberalism's current forward-looking agenda, such as it is -- immigration reform, climate-change regulations, some jaw-jaw about inequality -- doesn't really align with those unhappy voters' immediate priorities.

Which means that Obama's coalition, while real enough, may not be durable -- and that a Republican comeback at the presidential level might be more likely than many Democrats currently assume.

Especially since the liberal coalition's extraordinary diversity also offers many potential lines of fracture. To invoke an example from this year's grim centennial, the post-Obama Democratic Party could well be the Austro-Hungarian empire of presidential majorities: a sprawling, ramshackle and heterogeneous arrangement, one major crisis away from dissolution.

But this is where Hillary Clinton comes in. If her party is Austria-Hungary, she might be its Franz Josef -- the beloved emperor whose imperial persona ("coffered up," the novelist Joseph Roth wrote, "in an icy and everlasting old age, like armour made of an awe-inspiring crystal"), as much as any specific political strategy, helped keep dissolution from the empire's door.

I really have no idea what proposals Clinton will run on, what arguments she'll make. But as with Franz Josef, it's not her policies that make her formidable; it's the multitudes that "Hillary" the brand and icon now contains. Academic liberalism and waitress-mom populism and Davos/Wall Street/Bloomberg centrism. Female empowerment and stand-by-your-man martyrdom. The old Clintonian bond with minority voters and her own 2008 primary-trail identification with Scots-Irish whites. And then the great trifecta: continuity with the Obama present, a restoration of the more prosperous Clintonian past and (as the first ... female ... president) a new "yes we can" progressive future.

Like the penultimate Hapsburg emperor with his motley empire, then, she has the potential to embody a political coalition -- its identities and self-conceptions, its nostalgias and aspirations -- in ways that might just keep the whole thing hanging together.